You are here

Affirmative Action On Campus Does More Harm Than Good

Affirmative action, when used as a factor in college admissions, is meant to foster diversity and provide equal opportunities in education for underrepresented minorities. But is it achieving its stated goals and helping the population it was created to support? Its critics point to students struggling to keep up in schools mismatched to their abilities and to the fact that the policy can be manipulated to benefit affluent and middle class students who already possess many educational advantages. Is it time to overhaul or abolish affirmative action?

Tickets to the live debate are limited to Harvard students and faculty, but the debate will be broadcast live online. Please visit the livestream tab at right for more information.

Gail Heriot

We now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. We have fewer college professors and lawyers, too. Put more bluntly, affirmative action has backfired.

Before the <em>Grutter</em> case, constitutional experts thought that the days of race preferential admissions policies were numbered The Supreme Court had never really approved this kind of discrimination.

As well-meaning as affirmative action policies were originally, theyve backfired badly, and, at some point, colleges and universities and the courts are going to have to come to terms with that. (Heriot begins at 10:00.)

Race-preferential admissions were intended to facilitate the entry of minorities into higher education and eventually into high-prestige careers. There is considerable evidence, however, that they have the opposite effect. Affirmative action thus works to the detriment of its supposed beneficiaries, who are seldom informed of this risk.

The assumption behind the fierce competition for admission to elite colleges and universities is clear: The more elite the school one attends, the brighter ones future. That assumption, however, may well be flawed.

Richard Sander

Racial preferences spring from worthy intentions, but they have had unintended consequencesincluding an academic mismatch in many cases between minority students and the schools to which they are admitted. There's a better way to help the disadvantaged.

Randall Kennedy

Having snubbed outstanding black scholars in previous eras, the American Academy and similar organizations are using blacks like me to make amends and to serve other functions. I do not feel belittled by this. Nor am I wracked by angst or guilt or self-doubt.

A very strong argument can be made that affirmative action helps us. It helps us on our way towards reaching a state of affairs in which we can say that all persons actually enjoy the equal protection of the law.

Kennedy accounts for the slipperiness of the term affirmative action, delves into the complex and surprising legal history of the policy, and analyzes key arguments pro and con advanced by the left and right.

Theodore Shaw

Shaw discusses the history of affirmative action, and MALDEF's Thomas Saenz explains why continuing discrimination in Texas is particularly important to understanding&nbsp;<em>Fisher v. University of Texas</em>.

How can policy leaders of our nation's colleges and universities increase the racial and gender diversity of their faculties and student bodies so as to champion and sustain effective science, technology, engineering and mathematics ("STEM") programs in what often seems to be an overly complicated, barrier-laden, and hostile legal environment?

Ted Shaw, director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; Lani Guinier, civil rights scholar, Harvard law professor, and author of Meritocracy Inc.; and Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, discuss the future of affirmative action in education.

Like Prohibition, affirmative action and then diversity were originally noble efforts that were doomed  largely by their own illiberal contradiction of using present and future racial discrimination to atone for past racial discrimination.

This study is focused on ethnic and gender differences in science persistence at selective colleges and competing ideas about how such differences may be related to affirmative action admission policies.

Affirmative action is one of the most effective tools for redressing the injustices caused by our nation's historic discrimination against people of color and women, and for leveling what has long been an uneven playing field.

This book is an attempt to chart what race-sensitive admissions policies have meant both to the individuals who were admitted and to the society that has invested in their education and that counts so heavily on their future leadership.

While Sander has appropriately forced us and others to take a hard look at the actual workings of affirmative action, he has significantly overestimated the costs of affirmative action and failed to demonstrate benefits from ending it.

Substantial progress in increasing black students pre-collegiate performance is critical to eliminating the need for affirmative action. Absent such progress, the elimination of racial preferences in admissions will lead to substantial declines in black representation at the nations most selective colleges and universities.

The Minorities in Higher Education series, which began in 1984, is designed to help gauge the progress in our quest for educational excellence and equity for all races/ethnicities and for both men and women in American higher education.<a name="Statelegislation" id="Statelegislation"></a>

Whats more important to how your life turns out: the prestige of the school you attend or how much you learn while youre there? Does the answer to this question change if you are the recipient of affirmative action?

Does a state violate the Equal Protection Clause or political-restructuring doctrine by amending the state constitution to prohibit public universities and schools from using race in their admissions processes?

In <em>Fisher v. University of Texas</em>, the justices sent a thorny affirmative action case concerning the universitys program to achieve racial diversity back to the lower courts for further consideration under a tougher standard of review.

Together, <em>Gratz</em> and <em>Grutter</em> affirmed and refined the Supreme Court's position on affirmative action a quarter century after its initial decision in <em>Regents of University of California v. Bakke</em> (1978). The Court made clear that affirmative action programs are only constitutional if they consider race as one factor in an individualized evaluation, and only to achieve the goal of "class diversity."

The Law Schools narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body is not prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause, Title VI, or §1981.

Racial classifications call for strict judicial scrutiny. Nonetheless, the purpose of overcoming substantial, chronic minority underrepresentation in the medical profession is sufficiently important to justify petitioner's remedial use of race.

While higher educations vigorous defense of affirmative action on one level represents a sincere desire for greater racial equality, it has another less virtuous side to it, as racial preferences avoid the hard work of addressing deeply rooted inequalities and instead provide what Stephen Carter has called racial justice on the cheap.

Courtney Bowie, a senior staff attorney with the ACLUs Racial Justice Program, Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, Joshua Thompson, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, and Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, give their brief takes on whether the United States still needs affirmative action.

A proposed state constitutional amendment, dubbed SCA 5, would repeal portions of Proposition 209 that have banned the consideration of race, ethnicity and gender in public colleges recruitment, admissions and retention programs since 1998.